Aug 16 2012 07:47 AM
Re: The Bands that Time Forgot
Living Colour sort of splintered their way out of prominence, didn't they? They were loud and aggressive enough (and black enough) to still stand out after Guns 'n' Roses broke --- they were co-openers with GnR on the Rolling Stones Steel Wheels tour. They were second or third billing on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour, so they had cultural currency with the rising alternative zeitgeist revolution.
But in the Nirvana aftermath, they fired Muzz Skillings the same year Motley Crue fired Vince Neil and all the hair metal bands were firing somebody, and they didn't find their footing again. Their third album had a grungey name --- Stain --- and featured a photo of a woman in a brank...
... so you know they were trying to get with the macabre times, but it didn't do as well as they hoped. It had some Chili Peppers funky metal fusion thing with the bass taking some leads, and "Leave It Alone" got sufficient airplay, but maybe they waited too long between albums and came across as pretenders. They broke up in 1995.
I wouldn't say that they're particularly a band that grunge boxed out, so much as one that adapted to the challenges that grunge presented, but lost interest as they lost their center.
Maybe grunge advocates would never want to admit it, as tormented as they were by the state of America, but it was probably as hard to be black in the rock of the nineties as it was in the rock of the seventies or eighties.
